The Growth of Interactive News Media on Devices and Mobile Apps

By Patrick36 and Michael1

News media continued to become more integrated with apps and smartphones. Society has begun to see the trends and growth patterns that users have with these new avenues for accessing news. News is now available in text, audio and visual forms that can suit different worldwide users preferences.

Growth of visual Journalism hampered by small screen sizes and technical issues

Despite an increase in visual journalism, much of the population has been found to prefer reading the news in a text format. Although certain countries have an increased importance on receiving news through video and pictures, globally, a very small portion prefers to have their news based around videos. As the image to the right demonstrates, almost a quarter of these users are turned away by the small screen size of mobile devices and about 18% are turned away by the variety of technical problems that can arise from attempting to utilize video clips over the internet. Despite high interest, local news is rarely consumed in comparison to celebrity, fun, and sports news stories. 

The rise of news apps have not discouraged users from accessing TV and printed news

Though news consumption through mobile devices has greatly increased over the past few years, it has been shown that many of these users continue to access the news through other outlets. An average of 50% of users who utilize a tablet to access the news across all countries are shown to read printed news at least once a week and 86% are shown to watch the news on TV. This pattern continues with smartphone users, suggesting that many users seek news throughout their day from different sources based on convenience. These users may also point to many users being motivated beyond the convenience of mobile devices to seek and access news. 

Access to multiple news platforms shown to encourage user subscription while quality keeps users

 The ability to access one’s news across multiple platforms has been shown to be a positive factor in getting news subscribers. News publishers have made attempts to utilize this factor through bundle subscriptions, allowing users to pay for access these multiple platforms for one news publisher. These bundle subscriptions include not only print options but digital, smartphone and tablet, options as well. While quality is also a factor in getting subscribers, it has been shown to have a greater effect on maintaining these subscribers.  The experience of this content and the quality of specific writers within the publisher are also important. 

United States Leads in Users that Consume Audio/Visual News Media

According to the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2014, 34% of consumers in the United States used audio/visual means for news consumption. This is the highest number out of all developed countries surveyed. The primary online sources for this included Facebook (37%) and YouTube (17%). Consumers preferred audio/visual news due to its added drama or to increase comprehension. Even given this high consumption, consumers still blamed buffering and screen size as the major issues that prevented audio/visual consumption.